


Filling The Darkness With Order And Light

by Duck_Life



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Sibling Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-13 03:23:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5692705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Luke comes back. He and Leia can't stop fighting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Filling The Darkness With Order And Light

So, the Skywalker sibling reunion isn’t exactly heartwarming.

Poe and Rey quietly excuse themselves the second after Luke shows up in the General’s office. It’s hard enough standing there watching the General’s icy stare try and combat Luke Skywalker’s pensive beard, but once the screaming starts the two of them know they have to jump ship.

“You want to thumb wrestle?” Poe says, the two of them propped up against the wall outside the office.

“What’s that?”

Poe shakes his head. “Kid, you need an education,” he says, taking her hand and showing her.

Sitting there in fierce battle, they can’t help but overhear all the yelling. They may be polite enough to step out of the room but they’re not going to pass up the chance to eavesdrop.

It’s not as interesting as they might have hoped. Mostly, it’s just several variations of _“You can’t just run away every time your life gets difficult”_ and Luke retorting _“What good was I supposed to do here?”_ and the General stumbling over an answer to give him. And then it starts all over again. And again.

Eventually, Poe and Rey get hungry and go for dinner. They don’t see Luke Skywalker finally step out of the room, rest his forehead against the wall, let out a long sigh.

It’s late at night and the General’s letting her hair out, brushing it in long strokes, letting it smooth out over her shoulders. She watches herself in the tiny, scratched mirror taped to her bedroom wall.

In it, she sees her brother appear in the doorway. “Leia.”

“It’s late,” she says, and watches him in the mirror rather than turn around. “You’ve been given quarters, right? Do you need something?”

When she first saw the completed map to the Jedi temple where he’d been hiding out, the General felt elated, light. Luke was finally within reach again and she felt giddy, like she was floating.

Now she just feels like she’s floating through space, cold, alone, untethered. The ground seems impossibly far away.

“I didn’t come back so we could fight,” Luke says.

She doesn’t turn around. “So if I’m not nice to you, you’re going to run off again?” She watches his reflection turn and walk away.

Rey trains. She and Luke carve out a space of their own in one of the smaller gyms. He teaches, she listens. Rey stands on the mat and learns to stack dumbbells on top of each other.

“You know, when I was first starting out, I had to do this with rocks,” Luke says, adjusting her stance, and she thinks about him standing alone on a hill surrounded by rocks and stones and the unrelenting wind.

Poe and Rey eat lunch together every day beside Finn’s hospital bed, waiting for him to heal.

“Rey’s going to become a big time Jedi and leave us,” Poe says, handing Finn the bowl of soup he’d carried precariously from the mess hall to the medbay.

“Nah,” Finn says, burning his tongue on the soup. Poe winces. “She wouldn’t. Right, Rey?”

Rey’s too focused on Force-lifting her spoon to listen to them.  “What?”

“Eat your soup, Jedi,” Poe says, slurping his with no regard for how hot it is. “Hey, what’s Luke like?”

“Oh, you’ve met him.”

“Sure, once or twice,” says Poe. “But, I mean, what’s he like now?”

“Old.” She shrugs. “He always looks tired.”

The General organizes missions. Poe leaves and comes back. Finn heals and moves in with Poe. Luke’s never in his assigned quarters, and the one time Rey went there to look for him the room looked completely unused, the bed pristinely made, dust gathering on the desktop.

She finds him in the Falcon.

“Just looking for my jacket,” he tells her, tugging on it, but she knows he’s lying.

The General asks him, one day, if he might give a speech to the pilots.

“They respect you,” she says, clearing debris from the war room desk. “You’re a superhero to them, Luke. You could boost morale.”

He scratches his beard, sighs. “I’m not a superhero,” he tells her. “You know that. I just got lucky once when I was a kid.”

She grabs an abandoned pilot’s helmet and goes to hang it on the rack. “Well, that’s what these kids need,” she says, not looking at him. “Luck.”

They don’t talk about anything but the war, and even then they don’t mention the Supreme Leader, Kylo Ren, the casualties. Conversation becomes stilted between the two of them before it disappears entirely.

And then one morning, as they eat breakfast in silence, Luke launches a grenade. “You know, I’m not the only one who ran away,” he says, looking at his food tray. “You can run away even if you’re standing in the same place.”

The General slowly looks up at him. “Excuse me?”

“We all ran away, Leia,” he says, eyes boring holes into the table. “All three of us—”

“You’re bringing _him_ into this?” she says, and then she’s gone, gracefully grabs her tray and walks away.

That night, the General interrupts training.

“Oh,” Rey says, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her hair. “Good evening, General Organa. We were just… finishing up.”

“You can keep going, don’t stop on my account.”

Luke stacks a set of dumbbells on the rack. “We _were_ just finishing up. It’s fine.” Rey scurries off, not even looking back, like she’s running away from an explosion. “What do you want?”

 _I want to be done fighting. I want the First Order to be gone. I want my husband to be alive. I want my son to be on the right side. I want my brother back. I want—_ “You haven’t been sleeping in your quarters.”

Luke finishes cleaning up the training area rather than answer her. Finally, though— “Well, no.”

“You’ve been sleeping in the Falcon.”

He nods. “Not that it’s any of your _business—_ ”

“It is my business,” she says, looking right at him. He’s wearing plain white exercise clothes and he doesn’t look like a Jedi, he doesn’t look like a war hero, he doesn’t look like a myth or a legend or a story. He looks like the scared nineteen-year-old kid in an ill-fitting Stormtrooper suit who made bold declarations about rescuing her an eternity ago. “It is my business if I have to worry about losing the last Jedi as well as the best ship in the fleet in the middle of the night because _you couldn’t take it anymore_.”

“That’s not—”

“That’s not what?” she snaps. “That’s not what you’re doing? Like hell, Luke. You’re ready to leave. You’re going to abandon the Resistance, you’re going to abandon that girl, you’re going to abandon…”

They stand there at an impasse, and he’s thinking he could leave. He could walk out of the room and not have to face his sister’s face, her eyes like meteors.

Or he could stay, for once.

“I can’t sleep.”

“What?”

“I can’t sleep,” Luke says. “Ever since he… ever since I felt him…” And she remember him on Yavin, remembers his frown, watching Han Solo walk away from the rebels with his money in tow.

“Han,” Leia says. “You can say his name. I won’t break.”

“I might.” His left hand shakes a little; his right stays still as stone. “Ever since… Han died, I just haven’t been able to sleep. I felt it, when it happened… Every time I close my eyes it’s happening all over again.”

“So you sleep on the Falcon.”

“Yeah.”

Leia nods, feeling suddenly deflated. All she’s done since Luke returned is fight with him and ignore him.

She’s just tired.

Later, when everyone’s gone to their quarters or to gamble in the barracks— the General pretends she doesn’t know— Luke is lying awake in the Millenium Falcon.

His sister nudges him aside and crams herself into the cot with him. There’s not much room, but they’ve always been small, galaxies tucked into children.

The wall and ceiling surrounding the bunk are still covered in the glow-in-the-dark stars that Ben stuck up there when he was eight. Leia thinks about Han keeping them up all these years, the weight of it heavy on her.

And she thinks about what Luke said, _Every time I close my eyes it’s happening all over again_. She feels all the ghosts surrounding them. She feels her brother’s even breathing beside her. “Does it help?” she asks.

Luke just sighs. “Not really,” he says, and they lay there watching the plastic stars.

 

 


End file.
